Dear Evan Hanson is returning to the Bay Area next winter, the West End and Broadway hit Six is coming to town next year, and ACT is bringing in a new show by the acrobat troupe that created Dear San Francisco.

The upcoming season lineups for Broadway SF and American Conservatory Theater (ACT) are out, marking the first full season arrays for either theater group in two years.

Broadway SF previously announced the shifting of some of its touring shows that were planned for the 2019-2020 season into 2021, but we all know how last year went — and theaters really only began reopening last fall. This year, in the current Broadway SF season, we still have 2019 Tony winner Hadestown to look forward to (June 7 to July 3), as well as The Prom (June 21 to July 17), the Tony-winning revival of Oklahoma! (August 16 to September 11), and 2021 Tony winner Moulin Rouge (September 7 to November 6). Also, To Kill a Mockingbird, the Aaron Sorkin stage adaptation of the Harper Lee play, comes to the Golden Gate Theater September 13 to October 9.

Now we have the lineup for the 2022-2023 season, which includes some other recent Broadway hits including the Alanis Morissette jukebox musical Jagged Little Pill, which opens October 11 at the Golden Gate; and Disney's Frozen musical, which opens at the Orpheum on November 18.

Also coming are the Beetlejuice musical (December 7-31), Mean Girls (January 31 to February 26), and Six, the modern musical about the wives of Henry VIII (February 21 to April 29). Tina - The Tina Turner Musical will also arrive in August 2023.

Notably, after it was the subject of a lawsuit brought by Broadway SF's precursor, SHN, Dear Evan Hanson is returning to an SF stage in January 2023, playing for four weeks at the Orpheum. The Tony-winning musical came to the Curran in 2018, and SHN then took its former partner, Carole Shorenstein Hays, to court over a breach of a non-compete agreement — a suit that Hays ultimately lost. This led to her ceding control of the Curran, which she owns, to British theater group ATG (Ambassador Theatre Group), which also now runs the Orpheum and Golden Gate theaters after taking those over from the New York-based Nederlander organization, the other half of the former SHN (which stood for Shorenstein Hays Nederlander). It remains unclear, if and when Harry Potter and the Cursed Child ever closes, if Hays will again curate shows at the Curran.

Also of note, starting with the opening Moulin Rouge in September, the Orpheum is getting a new on-site VIP lounge experience that you can book for a $95 upcharge.

Find Broadway SF tickets here.

Over at ACT's Geary Theater, there's kind of an odd and eclectic season set for the fall and spring, beginning with Passengers, a show by the Montreal-based acrobatic performance group 7 Fingers. The group, and its cofounders Gypsy Snider and Shana Carroll, created the kinetic Dear San Francisco: A High-Flying Love Story, which has been playing since last fall at Club Fugazi in North Beach. And with Passengers, Carroll has directed a likely equally acrobatic, dance-centric show centered on train travel, which opens September 15.

Actor and highly skilled clown Bill Irwin will spend a week at the Geary in October with his ode to Samuel Beckett, On Beckett — which previously played at the theater in 2017. And the first actual ACT-produced production of the next season (that isn't A Christmas Carol) won't premiere until February 9. That will be the new play The Headlands by Christopher Chen, directed by ACT Artistic Director Pam McKinnon. (The SF-set play had a brief run in February-March 2020 at Lincoln Center in New York.)

Weirdly, though maybe not so weird given that the theater probably really needs some revenue flowing in after two years of being dark, ACT is doing a new musical stage adaptation of The Wizard of Oz next June (2023), directed by Sam Pinkleton. And then in August 2023, the world premiere of the Soul Train musical, originally scheduled for 2020, will finally happen.

See the season preview trailer below, and find ACT tickets here.

Top image: Abby Mueller (Jane Seymour), Samantha Pauly (Katherine Howard), Adrianna Hicks (Catherine of Aragon), Andrea Macasaet (Anne Boleyn), Brittney Mack (Anna of Cleves), & Anna Uzele (Catherine Parr). Photo by Joan Marcus

The role of Hamlet is a holy-grail, bucket-list thing for many actors eager to prove they can command a stage for over three hours and convincingly deliver the many famous soliloquies of the brooding Danish prince. More than any other Shakespearean role, Hamlet is a test of virtuosity as well as endurance, with a character who oscillates between grief, cunning, humor, rage, love, vengeance, madness, and pathos, and back again, and again, in the play's long five acts. For actor John Douglas Thompson, the role has apparently always been something he wanted to tackle, with Othello, Antony, and Julius Caesar's Cassius already under his belt, and ACT Artistic Director Carey Perloff — who is stepping down from the role after this, her final season — jumped at the chance to give Thompson a stage on which to play the tortured Dane.

ACT's Hamlet is well staged and adequately paced despite its typically daunting length — as written, the play would take over four hours to perform, and it's often cut down as it was here, in this case to three hours, not counting the intermission. And Perloff, as director, takes pleasure in teasing out the many moments of levity in Shakespeare's most complex tragedy. ACT veteran Dan Hiatt plays Polonius with plenty of bowtie-tweaking pompousness and farcical physical comedy; likewise does ACT company member Anthony Fusco, slightly miscast here as Horatio, bring his characteristic querying tone and amused skepticism to his role as Hamlet's closest confidant. And ACT company member Dominique Lozano is flippant and almost comically oblivious as Gertrude — almost too much so — until she's confronted by her son late in the play.

The versatile set design by David Israel Reynoso feels appropriately apocalyptic and industrial, and he uses a simple set of retractable sheer curtains to depict transitions between interior and exterior — Perloff says she wanted something inspired by places like Fukushima and Chernobyl, "places pitting the vulnerability of humanity against the toxicity of the world." The result is a soaring, foreboding set of concrete-textured walls, a fortress that doubles as an asylum, and an abandoned, contaminated nuclear power plant. (In keeping with that theme, they employ the sound of a Geiger counter every time the Ghost enters.)

Possibly the most powerful scene and most effective performance in the production comes in the second half, from Rivka Borek as Ophelia. The ACT MFA candidate is riveting as she portrays Ophelia's descent into madness, moreso than I've ever seen in a stage production — and Perloff's choice to have her don one of her dead father's suits and use a "bouquet" of his bowties for the famous monologue about rosemary and other herbs is an effective and clever one.

But coming back to Thompson's Hamlet: While he is eminently watchable and convincing during many moments in the play, using admirable restraint throughout the character's most well known soliloquies and his ultimate breakdown, I kept feeling distracted by one inescapable thing that is no fault of his. While tons of actors of all ages, many older than Thompson, have played this role for all the reasons I laid out above, I can't say I see it as a role that stands up to age-blind casting. Hamlet is a young prince, still in touch with college friends, prone to the fits of petulance, rage, and moral absolutism that one expects from a man in his twenties or early thirties (the text suggests the character is about 30, but possibly younger). Physically, too, this is a role that requires an actor to bounce, run, and jump all over the stage, and at 53 years old, Thompson is at best a capable Hamlet, just not always a believable one. Also, his voice came off as even slightly hoarse — perhaps just from rehearsing and performing the role in previews in recent days — which added to the distraction. As his father's ghost and his villainous uncle Claudius, Steven Anthony Jones does convincing work as Thompson's elder, but just given the fact that audiences most recently saw Thompson portraying a 70-year-old Louis Armstrong in Satchmo At The Waldorf, I feel like it shouldn't go unsaid that playing the 30-year-old Hamlet requires a bit too much suspension of disbelief.

Theatergoers new to Hamlet are still likely to enjoy this production, especially with the care that's given to highlighting Shakespeare's language, and the many, many turns of phrase that are now woven into English idiom, like "my mind's eye," "woe is me," and "heart of hearts" that originated with this important play. Also, Perloff and dramaturg Michael Paller stayed truer to Shakespeare's end for the play than many do when making cuts, ushering in Hamlet's foil, Fortinbras, prince of Norway, who gets the final words (though as usual, the subplot about Fortinbras avenging his own father's death through war gets a little bit lost in the shuffle of all the main characters getting killed).

Perloff says she pulled Hamlet off the shelf the day after last November's election, "longing to make sense of this altered world by reading something truly great," and she says she was "struck by the frightening resonance to our own time." As Polish theater critic Jan Kott has written, "Hamlet is like a sponge. It immediately absorbs all the problems of our time." This Hamlet does that and then some, in a contemporary fashion, though without any overt gestures — it's a Hamlet outside of time, loyal to the language and as natural sounding as it can be, and it's an auspicious beginning to Perloff's swan song.

'Hamlet' plays through October 15 at the Geary Theater. Find tickets here, or on the Today Tix app.

There is currently an overflowing, lovin’ spoonful of Summer of Love commemorations in San Francisco, from street fairs to outdoor concerts to retail window displays — but none of them really offers a plausible date night with comfortable, indoor seating. That’s the upside of the ACT Geary Theater’s production A Night with Janis Joplin, a two-hour-plus Broadway musical that opened Wednesday night at the ACT Geary Street Theater and runs through July 9. This show is the Summer of Love homage that brings the most legit artistic merit, a full-blown Broadway production with an eye-candy light show and high-end production values.

The risk going into a show called A Night with Janis Joplin is that it will more resemble a cover band at some Reno casino lounge than a genuine Broadway experience (the show played at Broadway’s Lyceum Theater in 2013 and 2014). But A Night with Janis Joplin fashions itself more in the mold of Hedwig or Beautiful: The Carole King Musical by interspersing rants, monologues, and gut-spilling storytelling between the numbers wherein the lead (Kacee Clanton, who was the alternate Janis Joplin in the Broadway production) brings the psychology, neuroses, romantic frustrations, and freight-train alcoholism of the subject to life.

Clanton has pretty much made a livelihood out of impersonating Janis Joplin, having also toured with both Joe Cocker and Big Brother and the Holding Company to come out and perform Janis numbers. She can nail this schtick as well as anyone alive. But the monotonous peril of a cover-band show is avoided here with a quartet of greek-chorus performers who treat the the audience to lyrical visits from Janis’ musical influences (Aretha Franklin, Nina Simone, Etta James and others). The show is sort of a course in ‘Women in Pop Music, Post WWII’, and Sharon Catherine Brown stands out in both the first and second acts as anonymous character called Blues Singer who produces both of the show’s vocal high points.

Ashley Tamar Davis in 'A Night with Janis Joplin', Photo Credit: Kevin Berne

As a nostalgia musical, A Night with Janis Joplin is spectacular entertainment. (People next to you will be singing and dancing like it was Mamma Mia! Get used to it.) As a biography, though, it’s pretty threadbare. We hear nothing about Janis’ conflicts with her band Big Brother and the Holding Company, their name comes up precisely once in the show’s two-hour, 15-minute run time. There are no great backstage stories or gossip about Bobby, Jerry, Wavy, or any of Janis’ Summer of Love contemporaries. And Janis’ descent into drug addiction is pretty carefully smoothed over in a way that indicates the family’s estate had a hand in the show (they did).

So you won’t get a riveting or revealing biography in A Night with Janis Joplin, but you’ll get the musical thrills of seeing a Janis performance if you’re say, younger than 50 years old and you never got a chance to see her live. This rambunctious musical could end at intermission and you’d still totally think you got your money's worth.

'A Night with Janis Joplin' runs through July 9 at the ACT Geary Street Theater. Tickets here.

Related:Janis Joplin Biopic In The Works With Michelle Williams To Star

I'm willing to accept that, perhaps, I am not the right audience for the work of Peter Brook — the acclaimed English theater and film director who once brought the epic Indian myth The Mahabharata to the New York stage to great acclaim in the 1980s, and who directed the original 1963 film version Lord of the Flies. He is a man who is clearly fond of universalizing the myths and fables of other cultures, and of the stark, abstract soliloquies that come from such works, and the work of modern playwrights like Samuel Beckett and Caryl Churchill. But I am also inclined to wonder if, catching Brook in the latter phase of a great career at age 92, I've missed out on his finest work and therefore lack the deference that another critic might have to one of the theater world's long-lived and prolific artists. Having walked into his latest production at ACT, Battlefield, admittedly, forgetting his name and keeping my mind open to what was about to unfold, I soon started piecing together that this was the same director as 2014's The Suit, which struck me as a bizarrely misogynistic — and boring! — adaptation of a story from Apartheid-era Johannesburg that left me mad about the 75 stultifying minutes I'd lost watching it. Similarly with Battlefield, I found that the 70-minute, no-intermission adaptation of an ancient Indian poem about war was plodding and ponderous in all the wrong ways, despite the fine efforts and occasional humor of its cast, and it shined little new light on the topics of death, destiny, and war, though these topics were much discussed.

The play is an adaptation, by Brook and his longtime collaborator Marie-Helene Estienne, of the latter portion of The Mahabharata, an ancient text well known to all Hindus. It tells the story of two warring, interrelated families who are ultimately given two separate kingdoms, only to return to war and cause the death of millions. Battlefield opens as the two cousin-kings, including the victor Yudishthira (Jared McNeil), ponder the aftermath of a great battle, in which each sent their sons and family members to die. What follows are a series of disjointed fables about animals, exploring ideas of fate, death, and the ignorance of mankind, interspersed with some fantastic traditional drumming by Toshi Tsuchitori.

Much as in Brook's staging of The Suit, there is little to no set, and the music provides some scant relief between scenes that almost beg for parody in their abstraction and earnestness. This is classical acting applied to a classic text, and the performers use only a set of large blankets to transform themselves between their human characters and animals.

Brook has gotten fonder of this stripped-down, contemporary style of theater, and he says in an interview that over his career, "I gradually became more interested in the human being than in the machinery around him or her, I began not to eliminate, but to let things drop away by themselves, and I saw that something more was coming through."

That may be the case, but for me, as a theatergoer, such starkness, paired with a text as arch, meditative, and (mostly) humorless as this, leads to restlessness. I'd hate to admit this is because I've become more and more a product of the hyper-stimulated time we live in — I'm actually very good at sitting still to watch theater that's two or three hours long, and I do it all the time. But I have to wonder if I'm simply set at a different tempo from a play like this, or if my impatience was more a product of a piece that needed more direction, and more artfulness, to get its message across. In the end there was nothing moving here, and no messages about war that resonated with contemporary times apart from the simple fact that war is avoidable, ugly, and bad. But I can't begrudge Mr. Brook wanting to explore those ideas again at his own pace.

Battlefield plays at ACT through May 21.

Annie Baker's latest play , currently running at ACT's Strand Theatre, is a story about truth, lies, madness, God, ghosts, and Vienna Fingers, although not necessarily in that order.

John is set in a bed and breakfast in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, run by Mertis Katherine Graven (Georgia Engel), who prefers to go by "Kitty" though no one else actually calls her that. It's the weekend after Thanksgiving, and Mertis's only guests are a twentysomething couple, Jenny (Stacey Yen), and Elias (Joe Paulik), who are on their way back to Brooklyn after visiting Jenny's family in Ohio.

We learn when he was growing up, Elias was a Civil War buff, despite a childhood spent in California in an Esalen-esque retreat run by his hippie parents. Jenny, who does not share Eli's fascination with Gettysburg, has nonetheless agreed to the stopover, mainly in the hopes it will relieve some of the tension that is currently filling their relationship; they're having "issues."

But once menstrual cramps overwhelm Jenny, she opts to stay behind at the B&B, and finds herself sharing some surprising moments with Mertis and Mertis's equally surprising friend Genevieve (a perfectly deadpan Ann McDonough), an elderly woman who has lost both her sight and her mind.

Technically, there are only five characters in John, though the amazingly detailed set by Marsha Ginsberg is almost a character itself. Every inch is filled with tchotchkes and dolls; a large Christmas tree, complete with a miniature, fully lit town at its base, stands in one corner, with lights that have a tendency to flicker on and off, as if commenting on the action. Another corner is home to "Paris," which is what Mertis calls the tiny dining area, each table decorated with lit-up Eiffel towers. Characters often disappear into the set's second story and a hallway's darkened entryway, their conversations becoming muted, just as they would in an actual bed and breakfast.

The decor's dolls are particularly unsettling to Jenny, who had a complicated relationship with dolls as a child, and with one in particular, an American Girl dolled named Samantha. Of course, Mertis has the same doll, and it sits on the wall, reminding Jenny how much it freaked her out as a kid, and how she was convinced Samantha would stare at her in anger, anger about having to be a doll...

But Samantha the doll isn't the only spooky thing about John. The play is filled with a constant and foreboding sense of weirdness. The blind Genevieve is convinced she can hear the house emitting noises no one else can hear; Mertis tells a story of the house's use as a hospital during the Civil War; and a player piano has a life all its own.

So while much of the play's plot is based in realism, specifically the, at times, painfully mundane story of a twentysomething couple's relationship issues, almost everything else feels slightly supernatural, or at least, unreal.

Mertis opens and closes each act by opening and closing the stage's curtains. She also turns the hands on a grandfather clock, and at first this, paired with some beautiful lighting changes from lighting designer Robert Hand, comes off as just a clever bit of stage direction to help illustrate the passage of time. But when she does it in full view of another character, we begin to question Mertis's mere mortal status.

Annie Baker wrote the role of Mertis specifically for Georgia Engel, and it is the perfect fit. Engel is probably best known for her role as Georgette in The Mary Tyler Moore Show, another role that used her almost ethereal speaking voice in a surprising way: she was supposed to sound dumb, but would often prove herself to be the smartest person in the room.

Mertis similarly comes off as slightly simple. Happy to have company; gullibly partaking in a weight loss scheme that involves hormonal injections; always ready with the perfect cup of tea and a plate of Vienna Fingers when you need them.

But as the play progresses she surprises her guests, and the audience. She reads Jenny a passage from her journal, a daily description of that day's sunset which includes descriptions that are almost gory, ("Phosphorescent oranges, grotesque reds, and blasphemous purples slashed open the sky"); when Eli asks if she's religious, she replies that she's a "Neoplatonist;" when Genevieve comes over for her "daily reading," Mertis reads a passage from H.P. Lovecraft's The Call of Cthulhu.

Ultimately, all of the characters have moments that come as a shock. (Genevieve's comes after the curtain closes on Act II, so stick in your seats.) But at over three hours long, with two intermissions, John can be a challenging play for some. Annie Baker loves silences as much as she does dialogue, and the play is filled with them. But I found myself loving those silences. They allowed me to really look at that incredible set, and gave me the space to think about what the characters were saying, and not allowing themselves to say. John is a play to be savored.

John runs through April 23rd at ACT's Strand Theatre. Tickets here.

The Afghanistan of A Thousand Splendid Suns is not one of splendor. The play's title is a reference to brighter, long past moments in Kabul's history — when women were once freer than they are in the timeframe of the play — and instead, the setting of the work is a harsh one. It's a place to be endured, particularly by the women central to its narrative who are essentially captive under authoritarian male rule.

When the parents of 15-year-old Laila, sweetly and brilliantly played at a variety of ages by Nadine Malouf, are killed by a shell blast in their home, Laila quickly becomes the second wife of her neighbor Rasheed (a villainous, desperate Haysam Kadri). Rasheed's first wife, Mariam (Kate Rigg), is initially threatened by Laila, but, maybe too quickly for the drama of the piece, comes to work together with her. After all, they share a mutual enemy in Rasheed, a man who is essentially their captor, and a stand-in for the authoritarian males of the city outside their home, — the Soviets, mujahideen, and Taliban, over the course of the historical period covered in the work.

To Laila, Mariam recalls her mother's counsel — "Endure," she was told as a girl. Endure what? "Don't you worry about that," her mother goes on, "there will be no shortage of things." Sadly, she's right, and Laila's and Mariam's pain and trauma — and soon that of Laila's daughter Aziza (Nikita Tweani) — is also the audience's. Enduring it is difficult, at times, though the work seems to think it's beneficial that we participate in it, if only for our education. When it gets particularly painful — a cesarian performed without anesthetic, the set itself echoing the surgery — that's tough, but effective.

Ultimately, Irish Indian playwright Ursula Rani Sarma's adaptation of Khaled Hosseini's 2007 novel, an inter-generational epic in the vein of his first hit book The Kite Runner has too much exposition to cover, even in two hours and forty minutes, and the first half of the play plods along with too few dramatic beats as directed by ACT Artistic Director Carey Perloff. To get their words out, actors nearly talk over one another, and there's little room for reflection or for the characters to convey their interiority.

Likely realizing this challenge, Perloff cleverly navigates it at times: While we watch Laila and Mariam waiting for a man to buy them a train ticket, for example, Laila asks how much time has gone by. "Five minutes," Mariam tells her after just several seconds. "And now?" Laila asks again moments later. "And now ten," Mariam replies. At moments like this the fast pacing becomes surreal and particularly interesting: Mariam remembering her mother, for instance, floating across the stage, or Laila recalling her former love, Tariq, as limping on and off of it.

An excellent score composed and played by David Coulter (Kronos Quartet) smooths over the faster, rougher transitions and gives a through-line to the work, whose second half is better paced and more rewarding. There's dramatic payoff, but especially in its accelerated form, it's heavy handed. One line, that “Like a compass needle that points north, a man’s accusing finger will always find a woman," provides thematic direction, and the irony of men keeping women cooped up and covered up for fear, they claim, of other bad men in the outside world, is a powerful animating irony.

The claustrophobia the characters experience is conveyed well to the audience: Spare, surrealistic set design from Ken Macdonald pens us in elegantly, and Perloff's use of that set is at times brilliant. A table that's flipped upright on its legs becomes a closet or basement holding Laila and her infant child, while a flipped bed frame becomes nearly a cage for Mariam as she's beaten by Rasheed.

There's power in bearing witness to their pain, as they bear witness to and provide support for one another as well. But audiences won't be blamed for wanting to depart from Rasheed's cruel world as much as they want Laila and Mariam to.

A Thousand Splendid Suns runs through February 26 at ACT's Geary Theater. Tickets here.

Most actors pay lip service to the all-important role of playwrights and screenwriters, saying something cliché to the effect of "I'm nothing without his/her words." But most actors are also great egotists who secretly refuse to think of themselves as vessels for someone else's words, but more as artists and interpreters without whom the words would have little meaning. Master clown and actor Bill Irwin, now 66, is not such an actor, and over the course of a career that's spanned five decades he's found in Samuel Beckett a spiritual father of sorts — a poet who shares his Irish heritage as well as his love of language, absurdity, and clowning tropes. As a young man he met Beckett in Paris, shortly before the novelist and playwright died, around the time he was playing Lucky in a 1988 Lincoln Center production of Waiting for Godot alongside Robin Williams. And though he regrets not being well read enough or inquisitive at the time to ask all the questions he'd love to ask now of the writer, it's clear the two shared a bond as men of the physical stage, even if they only shared an hour or so together in life.

"Mr. Beckett was incredibly specific, always, about headware," Irwin explains in his self-crafted master class in Beckett, On Beckett, now in a limited run at ACT's Strand Theater. And most often in his character descriptions, Beckett specifies bowler hats, hats that are evocative of a certain brand of comic Irishman, as well as most men in a certain era when bowlers were in fashion, and of which Irwin brings a half dozen versions to the stage with him. But as more performer than writer or scholar, it's the hats — the sizes of them, the various angles at which they can be cocked, when and how to take them off and gesture with them — that fascinate Irwin almost equally as much as Beckett's linguistic rhythms and playfulness, and in this piece he dissects the visual language that any hat carries with it in a way that most Beckett scholars could not. And that stands to reason, since an actor who has been a student of Beckett from the stage, living within his characters for several decades, has a far different and more physical take on the work than someone who knows it primarily from the page.

Irwin got his start in clowning immediately after attending Oberlin College, enrolling in Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Clown College in 1974, and then moving to San Francisco to join the fledgling Pickle Family Circus in 1975 as one of their first clowns, alongside founder Larry Pisoni and Geoff Hoyle. Irwin remains in fine form these days, after winning a Tony Award in the last decade for his portrayal of George in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? alongside Kathleen Turner, and putting his clowning and movement skills to use in a Broadway revival of Beckett's Waiting for Godot in 2009 alongside Nathan Lane. He later brought Moliere's Scapin to ACT in 2010, played a forceful but tender Hamm in Endgame here in 2012, as well as bringing a brief early run of On Beckett in 2015.

He now opens On Beckett with the caveat that he is no scholar, and shockingly admits that he's never read Beckett's famous novels like Murphy and Molloy. His perspective on Beckett is steeped deeply in his two great plays, Godot and Endgame, as well as with his 1967 collection of prose experiments called "Texts for Nothing," and it's from these texts along with a short passage from the novel Watt that Irwin draws his examples.

On Beckett doesn't have a thesis or reason for being beyond Irwin's passion for the plays, and his desire to share several little-known pieces from "Texts for Nothing" that he adores — all three of which include some nice wordplay and images, but which don't amount to much more than prose poems, even if the same could be said of many Beckettian monologues, like the famed 500-word doozy Lucky delivers in Waiting for Godot, a small portion of which Irwin launches into toward the end of On Beckett. But as a performer with immense talent for movement, and bodily control, there's no getting around how unique Irwin's perspective is on Beckett's writing — and ACT artistic director Carey Perloff, a bit of a Beckett scholar herself, has been known to say that Beckett is a "playwright of the body," as Irwin relates, and Irwin clearly counts among the playwrights ideal interpreters.

The piece is, nonetheless, a bit unstructured and rambling, as if it were an impromptu workshop Irwin were giving to student clowns getting their first introduction to Beckett, which is as much about Irwin's thought process around speaking lines and adding movements as it is about the work itself.

Beckett's work is often cryptic and inscrutable, and as a reader and audience member it's easy to let it wash over you without parsing it too carefully. Here, Irwin asks us to listen to how he parses a few bits, and see how he thinks they should be performed, baggy pants, oversized shoes and all.

On Beckett plays through January 22 at The Strand. Find tickets here.

Just open as of last night at ACT, The Realistic Joneses by Will Eno is a sometimes difficult, awkwardly funny, and starkly modern play that delves into the lives of two couples suffering from similar fates. I'll just say now that if you're the sort that prefers no spoilers in your reviews, this review will contain one specific spoiler, but it is not one that will necessarily alter your experience of the play very negatively.

The Realistic Joneses spent several months on Broadway in 2014 with an all-star cast including Tracy Letts (Homeland), Toni Collette, Michael C. Hall (Dexter), and Marisa Tomei, as two couples both named Jones who find each other in a small town near mountains in an unnamed state. Here it's cast, obviously, with lesser known names but also with a key difference — the younger Joneses, played by Hall and Tomei, are here played by much younger actors, both clearly in their twenties as opposed to in their forties. While I did not personally see the Broadway production, it's notable because it fundamentally changes the nature of the interaction between the two — especially as you see the younger John (James Wagner) flirt lightly with the older Jennifer (Rebecca Watson), who's married to Bob (Rodd Gnapp) — who we learn in an early scene is suffering from a rare and seemingly incurable, congenital disease, perhaps something like ALS. Likewise, there is a connection between the younger Pony (played here with convincing flightiness and innocence by Allison Jean White) and the older, ailing Bob, which seems naturally fatherly, but would feel much different if the age spread were not so great. I'll just say this casting choice by director Loretta Greco is confusing, but may have just been an attempt to distinguish this production from the all-star one.

OK, here comes the spoiler: We learn mid-way through, amidst the spare, deceptively simple dialogue of this play and obtuse jokes from John, that the younger John has come to live in this town to see the same specialist whom Bob sees, because he suffers from the same rare syndrome. And because his wife Pony seems so incapable of coping with the seriousness of his illness, and incapable of taking care of him regardless, he's decided to hide this from her, letting her believe that it was her idea that they moved to this town. From here, the real meat of the drama unfolds, as the two couples continue to see each other and become friends, and as the two men face, with a certain amount of nihilistic humor and exhaustion, their eventual fates.

Eno's linguistic universe is unquestionably a stylized one. His characters speak in brief, sometimes broken phrases and simple, American cadences without a lot of pretense. And this is a play about people who are not particularly skilled, intellectually, or at all spiritual, eking out some day to day comfort and meaning in the face of the seeming meaninglessness of their lives.

Or, perhaps, it is the very lack of meaning one can find in the facing death, and the absurdity of it, that Eno is more accurately after. His work has been compared to Beckett and that is fair, but unlike Beckett's often absurdly hopeful fools, all the hope has been drained out of the Joneses for the most part. By the final vignette there is a tiny sliver of it, but even it feels a bit inauthentic — like the sort of thing one talks about when one talks about death, even if one doesn't believe it, really.

In particular, Wagner's performance as John is a standout, not just for its believability but for his cynical and convincingly dismissive demeanor.

The moody set by designer Andrew Boyce — with its pair of house exteriors and series of scrims behind actual tree trunks, giving on to a clear sky of stars — works best for all of the backyard nighttime scenes, which comprise the majority. Lighting, though, fails to evoke daylight the few times we're meant to know it's daytime.

How much you like this play is probably going to rest on how much you enjoy the humor of the absurd, and the awkward, and can involve yourself in the lives of characters who probably would prefer you not involve yourself at all and just leave them alone. That is, realistically speaking, often how families dealing with a protracted illness can be.

The Realistic Joneses plays through April 3 at the Geary Theater. Find tickets here.

In what's arguably the first piece of gutsy, experimental theater to hit the stage at A.C.T.'s Strand Theater — the ostensible mission of which is to provide space for more experimental stuff — The Unfortunates opened on Friday, and no one can claim it doesn't push some boundaries. It's got some delightful musical moments and arresting visuals, but unfortunately for The Unfortunates, it has more than its share of missing pieces too — but such is the risk with experimentation, and for theater lovers it's still worth a ticket.

Having read nothing about the piece besides the fact that it was an import from the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, where it premiered in 2013, I went into the play not even knowing that it was a full-fledged musical. It most certainly is, in that it is more music than dialogue, some of which is very catchy, moving, and well realized. But this is a musical that, while artfully blending elements of blues, R&B, folk, gospel, and hip-hop, is lacking in a book writer. It's a dream play with no clear narrative line, or sense of time or place, but instead weaves together symbols, songs, and a kind of dark comic-book mythology for its central character, Big Joe (played by co-creator Ian Merrigan) into a mashup that comes off as David Lynch and Matthew Barney meet Sweeney Todd and The Scottsboro Boys.

Looking into the dramaturg's notes in the program after the show, a lot of this started to make more sense. The five co-creators worked from the inside out, first creating songs and choosing as their starting point the popular early 20th Century blues song, "St. James Infirmary." Three of the creators were part of an acapella group called 3blindmice, and their common musical love was hip hop and beatboxing. They took their talents and various backgrounds (songwriter Casey Lee Hurt also brought with him a gospel background from being a third-generation former Southern Baptist preacher), a loose idea about three friends who volunteer for a war (it's either World War I or II, or a bit of both), and began building the myth of Big Joe through song.

By far the strongest element of the show is the music, from its rollicking and blues-y opening ensemble numbers, to the moving folk ballad "Down and Out," which you can hear below, recorded in 2012 by Merrigan and Hurt.

For those who go to theater without any heavy expectation of narrative, there is a lot to love here — fans of Cirque du Soleil or clowning in general will no doubt love this piece. Co-star and co-creator Jon Beavers is especially funny and dynamic in the role of Coughlin, Big Joe's war buddy who is killed in battle and spends the majority of the show as a clownish specter who haunts him; and Taylor Iman Jones is marvelous as the female lead Rae, an armless "songbird" who steals Joe's heart and whom he follows into a dark — and very musical — netherworld. Also memorable is Eddie Lopez who plays a clown figure named Koko, as well as his own undead foil, with great physical skill.

The scenic design, too, by Sibyl Wickersheimer, and costumes by Katherine O'Neill make up the impressive visual glue of The Unfortunates along with some highly original choreography by Erika Chong Shuch.

But ultimately I craved some narrative grounding, a compelling story, and clear sense of the characters to unify what otherwise is an impressively and aggressively original piece of theater. Was this all a dream? A commentary on war? A commentary on death and disease? (There's a repeated plot point about a "plague," the dots of which are never connected.) I really couldn't say, though a lot of the audience seemed not to care as they tapped their feet.

In an era when Hamilton is wowing audiences in New York and set to begin a national tour this summer, with its unique blend of pop, hip-hop, and musical theater sensibilities, it's clear that the theater needs more experiments like this. The intricacy and beauty of the genre blending, indeed, is one of the strongest cases for seeing The Unfortunates. It just falls short of greatness by being more of a dance/performance piece set to a jukebox of original songs, than a play.

The Unfortunates plays at The Strand Theater at 1127 Market Street through April 10. Tickets here.

Now that the holidays are behind us, we can focus on the ongoing and upcoming seasons of our best local theater companies. And assuming you like live theater and don't always know what's happening locally, this can be your heads up.

For all the twentysomethings out there who are paying too much in rent, you should know that many of these theaters are extremely eager to attract younger audiences. Berkeley Rep offers half-price tickets to every show if you're under the age of 30; the Magic Theatre has Next Gen nights with $20 tickets, free drinks, and post-show receptions for students and young artists and professionals; Shotgun Players offers $5 tickets to people 25 and younger; and A.C.T. does Bike-to-Theater nights, usually during previews, with bike valet provided by the SF Bicycle Coalition and discounted tickets starting at $10.

American Conservatory Theatre (A.C.T.)
Satchmo at the Waldorf begins previews this week and officially opens at ACT's Geary Theatre on January 20. It's a one-man show starring John Douglas Thompson centering on a moment in the final months of jazz legend Louis Armstrong's life, in 1971.

Starting previews on February 3 is The Unfortunates, the newest production in the new Strand Theater on Market Street. The piece developed by a quartet of writers premiered at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival last year and is described as a genre-bending "musical fever dream that's as life-affirming as it is darkly imaginative."

And on March 9, performances begin at the Geary Theater for Brooklyn-based playwright Will Eno's latest comedy, The Realistic Joneses, all about two couples in a small American town who share the same last name. (It was a hit on Broadway in 2014 starring Toni Collette, Marisa Tomei, and Michael C. Hall.)

The Aurora Theatre Company
Just up the street from Berkeley Rep, this smaller and scrappier company is doing two plays this winter: the West Coast premiere of The How and Why, about women in science clashing over what it means to be women (opening March 18); and Little Erik, a contemporary adaptation of Ibsen's Little Eyolf (opening January 29).

Berkeley Repertory Theatre
The inaugural production in the brand new Peet's Theatre (the renovated Thrust Stage) will be the premiere of a new play by Julia Cho that was developed at Berkeley Rep's Ground Floor titled Aubergine. It's directed by company artistic director Tony Taccone, and is described as a "meditation on family, forgiveness, and the things that nourish us."

The big main stage production of the season is Macbeth starring Frances McDormand and Conleth Hill, and remarkably it hasn't sold out yet — but it will. Previews start on February 19, and this marks the most high-profile appearance of Oscar-winning McDormand in years, and it's sure to be a stellar production directed by "go-to guy for Shakespeare" Daniel Sullivan.

The Curran Theatre
As I talked about in December, the Curran is undergoing a major makeover, both physically and creatively, under the helm of producer Carole Shorenstein Hays. And one of the first major examples of that will be a brief, six-night run of Taylor Mac's ambitious 24-Decade History of Popular Music — two parts of it anyway. Mac (whose play Hir was a recent hit off-Broadway), in his inimitable, off-the cuff style, spends an hour on each decade beginning in 1776, with each part lasting three hours, so here you'll get to see either 1776-1806, or 1806-1836, starting January 21.

Cutting Ball Theater
Arguably SF's most experimental theater company is staging Ondine, which starts previews on February 5. It's a world premiere based on the classic mermaid myth by playwright Katharine Sherman, directed by founding artistic director Rob Melrose, and seems to come complete with Splash references.

The Magic Theater
San Francisco's only theater company dedicated to producing only new work is premiering Jessica Hagedorn's Dogeaters, starting February 3. Set in Manila in 1982, the play delves into the world of drag queens, celebrities, and power-players at the Philippines' version of Studio 54 during the waning days of the Marcos regime.

SF Playhouse
Starting January 19 is playwright Jennifer Haley's The Nether, a sci-fi thriller that follows a young female detective into a virtual wonderland that has become a popular new form of entertainment, exploring the moral complexities and technological possibilities therein.

SHN
Opening at the Golden Gate Theater on February 23 is Dirty Dancing: The Musical. If your mom is in town, or if you just want to have "the time of your life," you may want to consider it.

Shotgun Players
Berkeley's Shotgun Players has extended their production of Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap through January 24. But you should note that they're doing a cool, and high-degree-of-difficulty production of Hamlet in the early spring, in which all the actors will learn all the parts in the play, and will draw names at the beginning of each performance to see who will play whom each night. That starts April 9.

Theatre Rhinoceros
SF's premiere queer theater, Theatre Rhinoceros, returns from a hiatus with a production of Noel Coward's last play, A Song at Twilight, thought to be a "coming out" of sorts from the long-closeted and celebrated playwright. (Though Coward himself insisted the play, about "a cosmopolitan author caught in his declining years between two women," one of whom has been his wife of convenience for many years, was about Somerset Maugham.) Tickets are available here for this two-week run, which goes from January 20 to 31.

Previously: The 12 Best Local Theaters In The Bay Area

Now after three years of fundraising and construction, SF's American Conservatory Theater is getting set to show the public its brand new performance space on mid-Market, The Strand Theater (1117 Market at 7th). A.C.T. purchased the former movie house — which had become an adult cinema before shuttering altogether and becoming a home for squatters, back in 2012 — with a vision of adding a second, smaller venue they could use both for their MFA program productions and to stage edgier new works that are not possible in their large, 1040-seat Geary Theater. Now, after a $34.4 million renovation that includes a bright coat of red paint, the 283-seat main theater will debut with a ribbon-cutting ceremony on May 14, followed by hosting its first public performances, with the last play of A.C.T.'s current scene, Love and Information by Caryl Churchill, opening on June 3.

The renovation was funded through a major capital campaign that has raised contributions from individuals, corporations, and private foundations, as well as through New Market Tax Credits and Historic Tax Credits. In addition to the 283-seat mainstage proscenium space, there is a black-box space upstairs from the lobby on the front of the building, dubbed The Rueff, that will also be used for smaller performances as well as dinners and other events. It has potential capacity of 140 seats.

The theater itself has had a long history, having opened in 1917 as one of Market Street's first movie-only silent film houses, without a stage or backstage meant for Vaudeville performance — A.C.T. has had to build their own backstage infrastructure into the narrow space by doing so underneath the new stage. It went through many incarnations, including one as The Jewel theater, in which a shimmering cut crystal ball stood out atop the marquee that had to be removed because it was catching the sun all day long and shining in the eyes of horses and drivers coming down Market Street.

Known later as The Sun, The Rialto, and The Strand, it ultimately became a midnight-movie house in the 1980s, as you can see in the photo below, showing Rocky Horror Picture Show and even featuring John Waters marathons with Mr. Waters himself in attendance.

Photo courtesy of Tom LeGoff

It didn't become an adult cinema (along with several other older movie houses on this stretch of Market, including the recently demolished St. Francis) until the 1990s, finally closing in 2006.

Photo from 2003, before construction of the Federal Building behind it. Photo: Patrick Crowley

It then sat empty for enough years that squatters took root upstairs in what will be the new black-box theater space, and in small rooms that had been built in during the theater's seedier porn days. As part of the renovation, the A.C.T. team plans to preserve a little of even this part of its history, saving and displaying some of the graffiti they found inside, that you can see below.

The Strand in 2012. Photo: J. Barmann/SFist

How the theater looked in 2012.

How they found the upstairs in 2012, post squatters.

The renovation includes a highly sophisticated, semi-transparant, 28-foot-by-18-foot LED display (made up of 126 individual panels) that will dominate the downstairs lobby, shining onto Market Street. It's a first-of-its-kind application of this particular technology in a non-sports, interior setting.

The lobby under construction as of two weeks ago. Photo: Jay Barmann/SFist

An exterior detail, some wainscoting, that was recreated from covered-over parts of the building's original facade. Photo: Jay Barmann/SFist.

Following the public opening in June, the lobby space will also become an all-day cafe accessible to everyone on Market Street, transforming into the theater's concession stand only in the evening.

Also, A.C.T. won't be the only users of the space. Thanks to grants from the San Francisco Neighborhood Arts Collaborative and one from The Kenneth Rainin Foundation, the Strand will be available to other arts organizations in the city for both rehearsal and performance space on a no-cost basis. The spaces will also be for rent to touring and local productions, as well as for private events and corporate meetings. (I'm told the first private event already on the books before it's open to the public is a bar mitzvah.)

Without a doubt, along with the upcoming revamp of the former Renoir Hotel diagonally across Market, The Strand Theater stands to dramatically alter the face of this section of mid-Market, and will hopefully bring a ton of great new theater to downtown.

Stay tuned for photos of the finished space.

Back in February, news that the American Conservatory Theater would be investing in the Strand Theater renewed our hopes for the troubled stretch of mid-Market. Today, courtesy of the Planning Department, we get a first look at renderings of the new theater space.

The building has some history behind it. Built in 1917 as a movie theater, it was all flashy neon through the 40s, and apparently people used to think "The Great White Way" was a cool thing to call Market Street for some reason. Sadly, it last saw action as a porn theater in 2006.

As expected, the theater will seat 299, making it a much smaller space than the company's 1,000-seat theater on Geary Street and a great place to stage edgier works. A.C.T. will also keep and renovate the costume shop and secondary black box space down the block.

As for that stretch of mid-Market, it could desperately use something to break up that awkward block at night. (Don't try to use the bathroom in the Carl's Jr. across the street. It's a nightmare.) The proposal includes a cafe in the lobby which, ABC Licenses willing, appears to be pouring wine.

The Planning Commission will vote on the proposed designs today, so nothing's set in stone yet. Curbed reports they're already on board, and anyway, the proposal documents do contain about a dozen letters of support from local high school drama kids, and you'd have to be a pretty cold soul to oppose high school drama kids.

Previously: A.C.T. Invests In Mid-Market, Purchases Former Adult Cinema
[Curbed]
[Planning Commission PDF]

To celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Geary Theater, ACT held a giant open house, with demonstrations, discussions and -- best of all -- the chance to wander around nearly every corner of the building on a self-guided tour. How many times do we mere mortals get to stand upon the stage and, as Hamlet directed, "Speak the speech... trippingly on the tongue"...? More pictures here.

Photo by Kevin Berne
We saw “Quality of Life” at ACT the other night and can’t recommend it highly enough. The star-studded cast members each give exceptionally compelling performances. The play’s approach to contemporary themes involving belief, love, and death manages to make each perspective valid--- our head was reeling when we left the theater. Jane Anderson, a Bay Area native, wrote and directed the play. We caught up with her the other day, and the results are below. We love her take on what makes the Bay Area so innovative and unique. Buy tickets now and read on.

What is the Bay Area theater culture like?
You're talking to someone who lives in LA full time now. I'm nuts about San Francisco. It's like New York, but manageable. I find the diversity of the people just fascinating and wonderful. It's like a big giant Benetton catalogue. The neighborhoods blend. You get people of all colors all ages, all classes mingling together in one big soup, and I've really enjoy it. I was living on Sutter Street during the show. I loved that walk going to rehearsal, because I went through three different neighborhoods, it's a vital, beautiful city.

Where do you like to go after performances?
After the show to wind down, I like Wine Bar. It's in an alley next to Colonial. It's between Post and Sutter off of Taylor. It has the atmosphere of an elegant speakeasy. You go down these stairs, and it's like sitting in someone's living room with a bunch of hip people. The wine steward comes over to suggest a great glass of wine, and you unwind with actor and friends.